On the new exhibition at L’Eclaireur opening on March 17 2009, Arne Quinze presents various adaptations of Bidonvilles and Stilthouses broadening further on the study of livability in today’s context. Different forms and shapes embody different skyscrapers and dwellings but they are still inherent to the same architectural context.

Stilthouses and Bidonvilles are archetypical houses as a parody on the way how people are living now. Cities are developing with a never ending stream of speed. Without thinking houses are built in a rapid tempo next to each other. Those houses lack a vision of sustainabilty. Functionality of the buildings, streets, parks in overal the urban settings aren’t thought through. Bidonvilles and Stilthouses tranquilize or accelerate this process intentionally provoking open communication in a society of human interaction. Everyone tends to stay inside their created private box, how compact or large the surface they reside upon is. A surface enclosed by four walls seems to be substantial to the meaning of life which excludes individuals from being subjected to impressions and impulses squirted by their environment and other individuals. In place of freedom, we get a spurious fortune of solitude; instead of interaction, we get isolation; in place of striving for reshaping the system, we get a redundant realistic society.

Bidonvilles are favellas or shantytowns, yet at the same time modernized industrial skyscrapers. Stilthouses generate architecture as they are layered and hierarchical by design. We live above and around each other. The houses extract all the energy they can to satisfy their own requirements as well as the needs of their inhabitants in order to become an autarchy on its own.

Bidonvilles and Stilhouses symbolize crosscuts of Beijing, New York or São Paulo. The only difference between the people living in those populated capitals is a cultural one and the money cheque they receive each month. To Quinze all individuals are equal and don’t seem to differ as much from one another as they are trapped between their walls regardingless the amount of financial capital they possess and which tower they occupy.

Do you believe in a makeable society? Can people get out of their box? Will people achieve in finding the vital elements of life? Answers are up to ourselves.